Football: spectacularly insignificant or unspectacularly significant?

Abstract

Football supporters are often projected as being obsessed, emotionally saturated and intensely involved with their club. This may be true for some, but much of the time, the consumption of football is mundanely incorporated with other routine behaviours and actions. Drawing on previous research on football and everyday life, this paper explores how it is both significant and insignificant through the relationship between spectacular and unspectacular consumption. The ‘everyday’ is used both descriptively and conceptually. The former is illustrated through examples of the ordinary ways in which football becomes entwined with other elements of everyday life. The latter, rooted in the works of everyday life theorists, provides the philosophical tools for contextualizing the meaning of the ‘everyday’. This is then put into perspective with contemporary understandings of living in a fragmented and fluid world which raise further questions about the ordinariness of football culture as part of people’s everyday lives.

Notes

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3. Stone, ‘The Role of Football in Everyday Life’.

4. Bauman, Liquid Modernity.

5. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

6. Frisby, ‘The flâneur in Social Theory’.

7. Sugden and Tomlinson, ‘Digging the Dirt and Staying Clean’; Blackshaw & Crabbe, New Perspectives on Sport and ‘Deviance’: Consumption, Performativity and Social Control.

8. Blackshaw, Zygmunt Bauman.

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10. Chaney, Cultural Change and Everyday Life.

11. Lefebvre, ‘Toward a Leftist Cultural Politics: Remarks Occasioned by the Centenary of Marx’s Death’.

12. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment; Marcuse, One Dimensional Man.

13. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

14. Debord, Society of the Spectacle.

15. Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life, 107.

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17. Blackshaw, Zygmunt Bauman, 128.

18. Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 83.

19. Rojek, Celebrity, 9.

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21. Rojek, Celebrity, 192.

22. ibid.

23. ibid., 186.

24. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, 24.

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26. Abercrombie and Longhurst, Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination.

27. Crawford, Consuming Sport: Fans, Sport and Culture, 87.

28. Tomlinson, ‘Theorising spectacle: Beyond Debord’; Manzenreiter, ‘Sport spectacles, uniformities and the search for identity in late modern Japan’.

29. Tomlinson, ibid.

30. Debord, Society of the Spectacle.

31. Manzenreiter, ‘Sport spectacles, uniformities and the search for identity in late modern Japan’, 148.

32. Tomlinson, ‘Theorising spectacle: Beyond Debord’, 56.

33. Ilmonen, Ordinary Consumption, 18.

34. Robson, No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care: The Myth and Reality of Millwall Fandom; Giulianotti, ‘Supporters, Followers, Fans and Flaneurs’; King, The End of the Terraces; Armstrong, Football Hooligans: Knowing the Score.

35. Debord, Society of the Spectacle; Baudrillard, Selected Writings; Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture; Denzin, The Cinematic Society: The Voyeur’s Gaze; Abercrombie and Longhurst, Audiences: A sociological theory of performance and imagination; Penaloza, ‘Just Doing It: A Visual Ethnographic Study of Spectacular Consumption Behaviour at Nike Town’.

36. Benjamin, The Arcades Project.

37. Baudelaire, Paris Spleen; Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’; Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology; Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

38. Sennett, ‘Reflections on the Public Realm’, 381.

39. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 95.

40. Varcoe, ‘Zygmunt Bauman’.

41. Allan and Crow, Families, Households and Society, 62.

42. Barnes, ‘Systems Theory and Family Therapy’, 226.

43. Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism.